Conrad Aiken Short Quotes

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Forward into the untrodden! Courage, old man, and hold on to your umbrella!

Conrad Aiken
In one room, silently, lover looks upon lover,
And thinks the air is fire.

Conrad Aiken
Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.

Conrad Aiken
Ice is the silent language of the peak; and fire the silent language of the star.

Conrad Aiken
From some, the light was scarcely more than a gloom:
From some, a dazzling desire.

Conrad Aiken
'When you are dead your spirit will find my spirit,
And then we shall die no more.'

Conrad Aiken
Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust,
The horns of glory blowing above my burial?

Conrad Aiken
The one you love leans forward, smiles, deceives you, Opens a door through which you see dark dreams.

Conrad Aiken
Something had changed—but it was not the street—
The street was just the same—it was himself.

Conrad Aiken
How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead,
The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?

Conrad Aiken
We flow, we descend, we turn... and the eternal dreamer
Moves among us like light, like evening air...

Conrad Aiken
For in this walk, this voyage, it is yourself, the profound history of your 'self,' that now as always you encounter.

Conrad Aiken
Death is never an ending, death is a change; Death is beautiful, for death is strange; Death is one dream out of another flowing.

Conrad Aiken
Lovers walk in the noontime by that fountain.
Pigeons dip their beaks to drink from the water.
And soon the pond must freeze.

Conrad Aiken
And the shadows of tree-trunks and shadows of leaves
Interlace with low voices and footsteps and sunlight
To divide us forever.

Conrad Aiken
My veins are afire with music,
Her eyes have kissed me, my body is turned to light;
I shall dream to her secret heart tonight...

Conrad Aiken
His thoughts were blown and scattered like leaves;
He thought of the pail... Why, then, was it forgotten?
Because he would not need it?

Conrad Aiken
'I am the one who stood beside you and smiled,
Thinking your face so strangely young... '
'I am the one who loved you but did not dare.'

Conrad Aiken
Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid,
We have built a tower of stone high into the sky,
We have built a city of towers.

Conrad Aiken
A chorus of elfin voices blowing about me
Weaves to a babel of sound. Each cries a secret.
I run among them, reach out vain hands, and drown.

Conrad Aiken
Whitman had a profound influence on me. … He was useful to me in the perfection of form, as a sort of compromise between the strict and the free.

Conrad Aiken
There, in the high bright window he dreams, and sees
What we are blind to,—we who mass and crowd
From wall to wall in the darkening of a cloud.

Conrad Aiken
All lovely things will have an ending,
All lovely things will fade and die,
And youth, that's now so bravely spending,
Will beg a penny by and by.

Conrad Aiken
The poet walked alone in a cold late rain,
And thought his grief was like the crying of sea-birds;
For his lover was dead, he never would love again.

Conrad Aiken
It's time to make love, douse the glim; The fireflies twinkle and dim; The stars lean together Like birds of a feather, And the loin lies down with the limb.

Conrad Aiken
Was forty, then, too old for work like this?
Why should it be? He'd never been afraid—
His eye was sure, his hand was steady...
But dreams had meanings.

Conrad Aiken
We reach vague-gesturing hands, we lift our heads,
Hear sounds far off,—and dream, with quivering breath,
Our curious separate ways through life and death.

Conrad Aiken
The hiss was now becoming a roar—the whole world was a vast moving screen of snow—but even now it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep.

Conrad Aiken
The wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams,
The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street,
And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.

Conrad Aiken
Through soundless labyrinths of dream you pass,
Through many doors to the one door of all.
Soon as it's opened we shall hear a music:
Or see a skeleton fall...

Conrad Aiken